Quote of the Day

Matthew Yglesias, after noting that most foreign policy experts opposed the invasion of Iraq, writes:
One of the most annoying habits of the press and the DC conventional wisdom more generally has been a persistent habit of ignoring these facts in favor of the rhetoric of “seriousness” that casts war opponents as a much of ignorant [...]

Iraq’d

Buried in Mike Pence’s mindless Washington Times broadside is this foreign policy gem:
We must develop new strategies for strengthening our armed forces and homeland security, and be willing to oppose any effort to use our military for nation-building or progressive social experimentation.
You have to wade through several layers of Republican-speak to get to the real [...]

Upstaged!

Yeah, I cobbled together a chart on American foreign policy a few days back. At the time, I thought it was a pretty original idea. But it seems American Scenester Noah Millman went ahead and made a better chart over a year ago. Curse you Noah Millman!
Anyway, his original post is really good. Once I’ve [...]

Boot Up His Ass

Daniel Larison has the definitive Max Boot takedown.

Leave Hegemony to the Pros

The Times reports that the Indian Navy accidentally sank a Thai fishing vessel originally thought to be a Somali pirate “mothership.” For what it’s worth, I think this helps illuminate a few of the less visible benefits of American hegemony. While there’s no guarantee that a US naval vessel wouldn’t have made a similar mistake, [...]

Max Boot gets it

Here’s Boot on the affinity between liberal interventionists and neoconservatives (via):
As someone who was skeptical of Obama’s moderate posturing during the campaign, I have to admit that I am gobsmacked by these appointments , most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain. (Jim Jones is an old friend of McCain’s, [...]

The Spectrum of Foreign Policy Opinion

Daniel Larison has some thoughts on the Right’s inability to recognize differences within our foreign policy establishment. In Hot Air’s bizarro-world, self-described liberal interventionists like Samantha Power are somehow antithetical to mainstream conservatives despite the fact that both groups favor a muscular American presence overseas. Their immediate priorities may differ – Power’s individual forte is [...]

Has pacifism dulled my senses?

Cliff May kindly excerpts his review of The Dark Side (the rest is stuck behind a subscription firewall). Here’s the key bit:
For Mayer, it is axiomatic that the aftermath of September 11, and what it revealed about the flaws in the American security apparatus that made the jihadist attack possible, did not necessitate any new [...]

Somalia

Remember when we sponsored an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to topple an Islamic government? How’d that work out? Well, after years of bloody guerrilla warfare, the Islamists are back in power and the Ethiopians have washed their hands of the entire mess. Folks who invariably advocate a forceful, violent approach to foreign affairs are simply [...]

The Sound of Silence

The David Brooks column everyone is talking about is, I think, one of the best examples of the Republican Party’s unwillingness to grapple with the Iraq War and its aftermath. The impending intra-party fight Brooks describes centers on social and economic policy, with nary a mention of the war or foreign affairs. As an Iraq [...]

“A Better Manager of the Empire”

That’s Michael Berube’s take on an Obama Administration’s approach to US hegemony. It may sound like a trivial distinction, but improving our approach to foreign policy at the margins is a genuinely heartening development. Unlike some, I don’t have any principled objection to liberal interventionism. I think genocide, poverty, and war are pretty awful and [...]

Recklessly Invading Iraq Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

Having read John Schwenkler and Daniel Larison on how the Iraq War has undermined Republican advantages on national security, I confess I had some hope that conservatives would repudiate Iraq and embrace a more thoughtful approach to foreign policy. Then I clicked over to this McClatchy poll on the presidential race and found that McCain [...]

I’ll rent out Conference Room D at the Sunset Motel . . .

Now that Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Buckley have endorsed a ginormous conservative pow wow, I have no doubt that as many as twelve disgruntled interns will show up to participate. Perhaps RedState’s Erick Erickson would be willing to pass along a few tips on promoting civil discourse.
In all seriousness, I think the proposed ideological slugfest [...]

Understatement of the Year

From the Washington Post’s Obama endorsement:
Not even his fiercest critics would blame President Bush for all of these problems, and we are far from being his fiercest critic.
You don’t say?
–
On the substance of the Post’s endorsement, the most worrying thing is the writers’ absolute confidence that an Obama Administration will signal no real shift in [...]

Moral Consequentialism and the Right

From NRO’s Corner, Michael Rubin:
Senator Obama’s senior advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that Israeli counterterrorism and efforts to drive Hezbollah from Lebanon was little different from deliberate murder of hostages.
It would be good to hear Sen. Biden clarify whether, when he spoke of driving Hezbollah out of Lebanon, he agrees with Obama’s senior mentor who seems [...]

The Case for John McCain

With a heavily-Democratic Congress waiting on the wings, McCain’s hodgepodge of domestic policy proposals doesn’t have much chance of getting implemented, so divided government is probably the best justification for supporting a third Republican term (assuming you share my libertarian inclinations).
Unfortunately, one of the biggest reasons I’ve grown disenchanted with the Republican Party of late [...]

The Last Gasp (II)

Via TAC, I see that “Newsbusters” – a putatively conservative organization – has published a “response” to a favorable Washington Post book review of Professor Bacevich’s The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. I use quotation marks because I’m unsure if the author actually makes any arguments – fortunately, Clark Stooksbury says all [...]

The Trouble With Sarah Palin

Via Daniel Larison, I see that Pat Buchanan is desperately trying to convince himself that Palin is not a “neocon.” Leaving aside the definitional problems of the term – does anyone know what a neoconservative actually is anymore? – I wonder what Governor Palin has done to dispel the notion that she’s fully committed McCain’s [...]

Wag the Dog?

Andrew Bacevich – one of our most eloquent critics of the United States’ quasi-imperial foreign policy – has an interesting article (hat tip: Sullivan) in this month’s Atlantic describing the shift in Army counter-insurgency doctrine and its broader implications for US grand strategy. In short, Bacevich believes that the rise of counter-insurgency tactics is a [...]

The Future of NATO, continued

In response to my earlier post, a friend writes (via g-chat):
you realize the nato charter commits us to nothing, right?
it allows collective self-defense
“as we deem necessary” – we get to choose
i say let russia in too
it is a non-binding and irrelevant organization that does not, in just about any real way, limit our sovereignty
not to [...]